[QUOTE=brujaja]
The horse has rallied, he sat up and ate some soup today in fact.
It just doesn’t seem right to me that the opposite of a primary color should be a secondary color.
Red and yellow also have no blue in them at all. Why aren’t they its opposite?
If you mix orange paint with green or purple, it will also cease to be orange. You see, if you regard secondary and primary colors as the same thing (i.e., it is possible for orange to be the opposite of blue), then you must apply your logic equally. (i.e., purple and green are also opposites of blue, because the add-to-orange rule also applies to them.)
Really, what **Zeldar ** said is closest to the truth; I myself think of the secondary colors as a subset of the primary colors, not elgible to be opposites.
Sorry to sorta hijack your thread, Twickster. I love your word-related threads. (And your shaking-groovy-things threads! Utterly charming.)
[/QUOTE]
What brujaja said, Twickster, regarding your threads and sense of humor.
Also, just one more swipe at the soup-guzzling nag. If color, as a field of concern, is removed from its basis in the electro-magnetic spectrum and thought of in its difficulties for finding matches at Home Depot or Lowe’s paint departments, I think the color wheel (or better still, the color solid), is a marvelous tool for thinking of how hues, and shades, and tints and all the other measuring scales like saturation, intensity, and the rest, can be made to apply to the raw colors in the rainbow (or a prism’s output). Once you bring in all the attributes of turquoise or puce or lime green, it gets progressively harder to think of a true opposite to any color.
It’s like, “what’s the opposite of A-Flat?”
And which 9:00 is the opposite of 3:00? The AM or the PM one or the one from exactly six months ago?
For those who see what I’m driving at, try to identify other linear or spectrum concepts that get re-visualized into clocks or wheels or circles or maybe even some other shape that bumps up the number of dimensions where the other members of the set reside. Once you orient things like time and temperature and maybe even emotions (love vs. hate) into neat little geometric arrangements it’s tempting to think that they actually behave that way.
Not to get overly philosophical, if I haven’t yet, but I believe that many (maybe most) of our problems as a “thinking” species stem from our desire to think of things in a binary way, where opposites rule. I confess to being a basic “black and white” type of person in most matters, where if it ain’t X, it has to be Y. But at least I recognize it as mental laziness.
